Thursday, February 6, 2014

deathtokoalas
ok, so, as we all know, this record was hugely influential on both "post-hardcore" and, by extension, "post-rock". specifically, the "jazzy" guitar playing.

i'm just wondering if anybody can pinpoint any influences on the guitar playing on this record? i mean, i can hear an influence from new york (sonic youth, and the web of artists behind them), but it's not total. specifically, it's not the extent of the tonality.

more specifically, i'm hearing the sound come up in a lot of recent hardcore acts (animal faces, touche amore, la dispute, defeater, native, loma prieta) and i'm starting to realize that it's a huge part of what i like about them, partially because i'm relating it to my favourite post-rock bands (do make say think especially) and a bunch of noise & no wave i grew up with. so, there's all kinds of continuity there. what is really the source, though? it must have a history before spiderland.

conversely, i'm also wondering if anybody could steer me carefully through emo & post-hardcore from slint to the bands i've mentioned, with a specific focus on that clean and jazzy guitar playing. i was listening to post-rock & idm, mostly. up until extremely recently, i've never really been able to get into any kind of dc punk, or anything that's come from it. it just all sounded like noisy garbage to me. but, the merging of dc punk and melodic hardcore is striking me as a killer combination - the dissonance is reclaiming it from being noisy garbage. that, and a lot of these bands are writing weird concept albums and stuff.

anyways, yeah. research project - trace the guitar style on this record both forwards and backwards.


MrOtisotis
I'm not really clear on what your question is, but the guitar sound in Slint is essentially expanded upon in the band Tortoise, which is the band the guitarist of Slint formed after this album.

deathtokoalas
yeah. there was labradford, too. i'm deeply familiar with post-rock. it's the hardcore side i'm less familiar with.

the closest thing i've been able to find so far is the first june of 44 record.

MrOtisotis
oh I see what you mean, hardcore I know nothing of either, sorry I could'nt help you out

Lourenço Veiga
maybe king crimson

deathtokoalas
actually, i need to vehemently state that this does NOT sound like crimson of any era. it's sort of an annoyance to me, actually, because i grew up listening to crimson (and studying fripp's guitar playing). there's a certain metered guitar aspect to it that very vaguely sounds like some of the things robert fripp was doing outside of king crimson, but the proper influence on this in that aspect is steve reich, and not through fripp or eno but through branca, swans and sonic youth. a better english prog comparison than fripp & crimson is actually the hackett/gabriel period of genesis.

where crimson had an influence on post-rock is more indirectly through the symphonic side, such as a band like gybe!. that's lark tongues in aspic period crimson, mostly. all the weird rhythms and stuff can again more accurately be traced to the no wave scene: dna, teenage jesus, that kind of stuff. pajo's style was always highly fluid and lyrical, whereas fripp's was very jagged and constructed.

crimson, of course, has had a huge influence on various neo-prog acts from dream theatre to porcupine tree. and, through his work with bowie and gabriel, he helped define a "new wave" guitar style that was dominant in the 80s. you can also hear a lot of fripp in something like polvo, and a lot of the noise that came from it. but i'd really like to go back in time and yell at whomever it was that first drew the comparison between crimson and math rock. it was just lazy journalism. it must have been that crimson was the only band that the guy knew that played in abstract time signatures. i guess he'd never heard of led zeppelin. more topically, he clearly had no understanding of the punk jazz thing, or of john zorn.

Lourenço Veiga
the guy from slint? of course the style came from no wave but the guitars sound a lot like fripp.. if he heard them or not i dont care, they are amazing anyways.. big black, sonic youth, talk talk and rites of spring are obvious inspirations since they were an american hardcore band, and those guys were very close minded in terms of music (actually they only heard those bands - steve albini said) that was american and underground. glenn branca and swans and that stuff were an influence to the influences of slint, in my opinion

deathtokoalas
i dunno. i don't hear any rites of spring on the record, but i think i can weakly abstract the big black. talk talk is often cited in such situations, but i honestly don't really hear the similarity. sonic youth, i agree is pretty dominant.

regardless, i think the crux of my argument was that what you're mistaking for fripp is really reich, through a few channels of influence.

i was really more interested in charting the way forwards, and i think i've found an undercurrent that's been previously traveled.

DiamorphineDeath
there's a lot of rites of spring influence on this album dude....

deathtokoalas
i don't agree at all.

i mean, to begin with, i don't think rites of spring were very special. it's pretty garden variety, generic punk. embrace took a really weird spin on black flag (and ian mackaye's attempt to sell out didn't initially work as planned), but before that there wasn't really anything special about what we anachronistically label as emo. so, if you could identify a punk sound, there's not any reason to pull the influence from rites of spring specifically, rather than any other punk band - except certain conventions that are almost entirely bullshit.

....but there isn't a punk sound to the disc to begin with. at all. remotely...

Lourenço Veiga
lol of course there is... this is pure hardcore PUNK but slower (it's called post-hardcore). and i still think it sounds a lot like crimson

deathtokoalas
i've stated repeatedly that the dominant guitar influence on the record is sonic youth. at no point do the guitars deviate from a massive sonic youth influence. it's the only really discernible influence. that's the reality. as you've confused fripp with reich, you've confused dc emo with new york no wave.

i would nearly be willing to restrict the record to a SINGLE influence of sonic youth, and even insult slint by saying "man, they're just a second rate sonic youth knock off" except that there's a missing quantity. this record is 90% sonic youth, 10% something else (exact numbers derived from the a.s.s. equation). i don't know what that something else is. it'll bug me forever. i'll get it eventually.

Stefan Bruge
Although I'm sure they weren't influenced by them, whenever I hear Spiderland I am always reminded of The Gordons, an early 80s New Zealand band who have that Sonic Youth detuned guitar sound and sort of lurching rhythm that The Butthole Surfers would make their own. The Gordons revival starts here!

deathtokoalas
just in case anybody was curious, the path outwards i've found (and what i was more interested in discussing) goes through the following:

june of 44 - engine takes to the water (louisville)
a minor forest (sf bay area)
*indian summer (sf bay area)
*portraits of past (sf bay area)
*native nod (new york)

i've searched through hundreds of crappy (scr)emo acts of varying levels of popularity and that's the entirety of what i can pull out as being both influenced by slint and an influence on either late 90s and early 00s post-rock or modern hardcore or both, and actually being worth listening to. there's some other obvious links (eg, saetia) that are just awful. the sf stuff is noticeably coloured by drive like jehu and seems to be the "home base" of the sound i'm tracing here, if you will.

* - bands i'd flat out never heard of until this week.

if anybody has any further suggestions as to how to trace this particular jazzy guitar sound (and recited beat vocals) into the existent "wave" of arty melodic hardcore that exists, it would be neat to hear them.

and maybe we've exhausted the boundaries of the existing debate?

+Stefan Bruge it's a bit weird deriving the missing section from the butthole surfers, who were of course never meant to be taken very seriously. i just put on hairway to steven for the first time in a long time, though, and i think you might have a point.

what's interesting is that that record is a lot easier to deconstruct into morricone, zeppelin, hendrix, etc.

i was kind of hoping for an obscure jazz musician. i think it's a little bit of a downer to take it from there, tbh - but it's the best suggestion i've seen so far,

(pause)

yeah. halfway through piouhgd and i consider this issue resolved - slint is roughly 90% sonic youth, roughly 10% butthole surfers. so, we can close this discussion now.

unless people have suggestions moving forwards

gorryman
There is a doc in the works something like "following the breadcrumbs" might have some definitive answers ,,,being that they were from Loisville ,,,I might ad them kids is crazy down there I would dig deeper into jazz for lack of a better term for peeps like Larry Coryell and John Fahey awkward spacey finger picking and dissonance probably had a crazy jazz fusion drunk uncle around handing them weird vinyl "my two cents"

kerry mcphearson
Jawbox and Glassjaw are definitely the bands your looking for. "See For Your Own Special Special Sweethart" and "Worship & Tribute"...I would say that they also influenced artist like PJ harvey, Modest Mouse and Built to Spill. Hell spiderland even influenced  older artist  like Tom waits, Swans and Scott Walker

deathtokoalas
naw, that's exactly what i'm trying to avoid. terrible music, all of it (except swans).

glassjaw got a little better when they grew up a bit, but their early material is some of the dumbest noisy garbage i've ever heard. jawbox were always boring corporate pop that had more to do with bon jovi than punk rock. modest mouse, pj harvey and built to spill were equally boring indie rock for college dropouts. and i'd rather listen to bowie than walker.

but, while all of that horrible music was selling lots of records, there has to have been something more interesting happening under the surface because i can hear it's effects in bands like la dispute. that's what i'm charting out.

what i'm realizing is there was an underground movement i wasn't aware of. please avoid further corporate rock suggestions. not a fan of corporate rock...

o9k
Omg you are such a douche. Even if they (or you) disliked 'corporate rock' they could very well be inspired by it. Without knowing it, or just to do it differently. But to get back to the point, I think the guitar-style is influenced by Greg Ginn. He also had this unique "jazzy" and "off" way of playing.

deathtokoalas
i was rejecting corporate rock derivations from slint, not proposed corporate rock influences on slint. i asked the question, so i have a right to restrict the answers. really, nothing that's been discussed as influential up to this point would qualify as corporate rock. crimson had some influence on garbage like journey, but crimson themselves are generally acknowledged as "the prog band that never sold out". and they really didn't. even their early 80s new wave period remained challenging listening.

ginn and morris were both talented and educated punk guitarists and definitely stand out in that sense. i have to admit i'm not familiar with the jazz side of the sst catalog, and i'll acknowledge that's a good suggestion for possible influence. it's easy to see how they could have just grabbed some sst discs thinking they were hardcore and - surprise! but the ginn sound was more free jazzy. it's not really the flowing, shimmery, morricone-esque style that i'm hoping is ultimately traceable through from slint to defeater and la dispute.

to update on that, i've bumped into a band called frodus that seems as though they were destined for greatness and yet had to deal with unending bad luck. but they themselves sound, to me, like a cross between foetus and nirvana, with a heavy dual influence from la (jane's addiction, rhcp) and dc (fugazi). those shimmery guitars are there, but they're a minor aspect. so, i'm trying to find something parallel to that that jumps underneath the next wave of bands (that is, i'm seeking an influential underground, arty counterpart to thrice or thursday that isn't as metal as saetia).

to broaden the spectrum a bit, i should point out that there were some very mainstream 90s records that have that jazzy guitar sound - lp2 by sunny day real estate, ok computer by radiohead, razorblade suitcase by bush and to a lesser extent anything by tool. what i'm looking for might actually be those bands. these acts were teenagers in the 90s...

Chris Anderson 
Check out "Cows- Sorry in Pig Minor". The style reminds me a little bit of this, and it came out just before Spiderland. Not entirely the same, but I definitely get similar vibes-- and Cows are more on the hardcore side of things.

deathtokoalas
i'm not as familiar with cows as i am with some of the other stuff from the period (i tried a few times, but it's just too atonal), but i really don't hear what you're talking about - unless you mean to draw attention to the common influence from sonic youth type stuff, in which case that's true, but not at all what i'm talking about. also, that seems to be their last record, from many years after spiderland.

yeah, i'm listening to that one right now and i don't hear much of a comparison (except in the sense that the first track seems to be a bit of a joke), but it's definitely a lot less.....stupid.....than their earlier material.

i've never really understood why people really listen to stuff like ween, butthole surfers, cows, etc over and over again. or even the acid mothers. i could see how it would be fun to see live, but the recordings become flat out idiotic after the shock value wears off.

it mostly comes from zappa, but zappa's musicianship was really top notch, which can keep you coming back. bungle, i get, for the same reason. but the bulk of that stuff is just....yuck...

Chris Anderson
Eh, it's just music. I don't think it's really supposed to be taken that seriously. For the same reason people like Picasso even though his paintings aren't that technically impressive, people enjoy The Cows, Butthole Surfers etc. It's not about power levels or some pedantic wrong or right- it's just art-it's an aesthetic. It's meant to express a mood felt by people during that time- it's supposed to be fun. Even if something seems like 'a joke' that doesn't mean it shouldn't be taken seriously.

Personally, I think 'Cabin Man' is a pretty solid track, all around. It portrays a definite nihilistic kind of delirious aesthetic. On the other hand, I could argue that in a lot of cases Zappa gets too farcical and starts to suffer musically due to this-- but I'm not going to, because I get that it doesn't matter and that was just the art he felt like making at the time. Listen to what you like, I only recommended Sorry in Pig Minor because it has a similar grim existential aesthetic to Spiderland, albeit the group is more conventional for music of the period.

deathtokoalas
most of that strain of noise music is definitely not meant to be taken seriously, which is what i'm getting at. that's why it's awful. there's not serious on the level of satire, and not serious on the level of not having an artistic vision. these people were better labeled drunkards than artists.

and, no, art isn't entirely subjective. there's no use in comparing apples to oranges, but it's very much worthwhile to point out that this person here has a cogent thought process that was carefully put together and this person here flipped on a delay pedal and went for a smoke. at that point, it's up to the listener to consciously choose openly bad music, which is no doubt exactly what's going on when somebody picks a butthole surfers record off the shelf.

to put it another way, i run a review page that has a five year grace period on it because i want to get what the record meant rather than first impressions. there's a scale from 0 to 11 with 0 the highest, but it's not strictly a linear ranking. near the bottom, it's more about categories. a mark of 8 translates to "it's fun because it's stupid". i'll analyze something like white zombie that way. i know it's stupid, but that's exactly why the jokes keep on giving. that is to say that nailing white zombie, which would be necessary if i were to do the review objectively, would be to miss the reality that it's stupidity is also it's charm. there's a wide swath of music that, in this way, defies the way that music critics work. it needs to be put aside into it's own space.

i wouldn't put most of the material by meat puppets, butthole surfers, ween, big black, the cows or the rest of that batch of music in this category, because the jokes aren't good enough. it's just shitty music; it doesn't deserve that kind of special treatment. however, separating them out from normal analysis as outliers is more or less what most of their fan base is doing. in the more extreme cases, it may be all they listen to. understanding that requires a pavlovian, not a music critic.

there's absolutely a level of objective analysis underlying that, but it's suspended to take into consideration that the musicians involved are purposefully pushing back against it. personally, i'd rather just ignore that and bulldoze them into the crap pile, but that's precisely where the choice to listen to objectively bad music comes in.

Chris Anderson
That's just, like, your opinion man. Music is probably the most subjective art form there is next to visual art-- I think you'd be doing your line of critics and viewership a lot of credit if you'd stop using an arbitrary scale to rate bands that you just don't feel. You're comparing sounds, dude, literally you are comparing sounds and making that judgement, that one is silly and fun and the other is just stupid. I get it, I make my own judgements like that all the time-- I just don't know where you get off pretending you are so justified in your analysis. I guess that's the problem with critics, just have to convince yourself your opinion is final.

deathtokoalas
i'm not suggesting people aren't allowed to disagree with me. in the end, it is indeed merely my opinion. but, analyzing the creative organization of sound is not the same thing as analyzing the wind blowing through the trees. in the sense that organizing sound is a type of thought, criticizing music is as valid as criticizing any other argument.

(deleted post)

deathtokoalas
if this is trying to sound like red, it's the greatest failure in the history of music. i'm a fusion guitar player. i've studied fripp's playing in a lot of detail, off and on for roughly twenty years.

(edit: here's one of my frippertronics influenced pieces. there's several others if you click my name and check the vid. well, might as well, considering the length of the thread. /watch?v=OsbbHeMAenE)

and it was basically my childhood lullabies. it's a record i could hum from start to finish. spiderland is really not remotely similar. so, even if there was an attempt (and i'm really not buying this), the absolute dissimilarity indicates that there must have been more dominant, subconscious influences.

it sounds far more like the meat puppets.

besides, as has been mentioned repeatedly, it's abundantly obvious that they basically ought to be sending out royalty checks to thurston moore and lee renaldo. not that they'd take them. but, it's abundantly clear that that's the dominant influence.

rhombusskullvsteal1
this is distorted guitar which is used in post hardcore more than post rock, but could be said to take place in both. I think it's post rock/ emotive hardcore, or somewhere on the schism between genres. they are unique for sure. I don't know how to label them.

deathtokoalas
yeah. i'm not having difficulty putting the noisier aspect in context. that's kind of more my niche. like i say, i'm pulling it directly from sonic youth but there was a whole movement there, really. "no wave". it's the sound of 'for dinner' that has been hugely influential and seems to me to come out of nowhere.

as an aside, i don't think the spoken word aspect of this is really connectable to what was called "emotive hardcore" in 1991. in 1995, maybe, but that's getting anachronistic. i think that needs to be traced right back to the beats. but, through who? again, we have sonic youth as the most likely suspect, due to their sort of obsession with burroughs and others. in the context of the period, then, i'd have to put slint in the same genre as sonic youth and swans - no wave, with a bit of a goth flair. or even just alternative rock. it's fair to point out it had an influence on other stuff, but trying to connect it to stuff that came later is sort of anachronistic.

i honestly can't really hear what's particularly different about rites of spring at all. and it just sounds to me like mackaye was listening to a lot of black flag when he put together embrace. then fugazi drew a lot both on the chicago big black thing and the la rhcp thing, which brought that big bass sound forward as dominant in the area. for a good five years that big bass sound seems to have defined the punk of the area, or at least virtually all of it i've heard. one has to go to the west coast to hear the future (scr)emo sound begin to develop. neither this nor what followed it sound to me like they're in that dc punk genealogy; i really don't hear any dc punk or even chicago punk in this at all. it's all new york, to me.

ReadyMindsetGo
Just a thought that arose while reading this dialogue... instead of speculating and coming up with your own conclusions on who influenced whom, why don't you contact band members themselves with your questions? Also, I wonder what you hope to get out of all this.

deathtokoalas
asking people directly is never a good way to get a good answer. it's inevitably going to come with little more than a set of biases. i grew up listening to tears for fears and they formed a big part of how i understand melody. yet, i would never cite them as an influence, for a variety of reasons. so, i don't think i'm going to get anything out of asking them besides the standard story, which is at best incomplete.

and i'm just looking for a guitarist to listen to.

Dan White
Wouldn't an incomplete story from the artists themselves still be valuable?

deathtokoalas
i think i'm likely to get more valuable responses in a forum like this.

JeanPaul LeFebvre
I honestly think you are putting WAY too much thought into what these guys were thinking when they made this album. Just listen. Everybody is going to hear something different. That's what is so great about music.

deathtokoalas
nah. i'm just looking for the source of the guitar style, again mostly because i like listening to it. although, admittedly, also because i have a hobby review site that aims to piece together these kinds of connections.

for me, the sound peaks in do make say think. so, when i get around to writing essays about their records, i'm going to want to understand the historical context properly.

i know writing these histories is something a lot of people frown on, but it's something i think somebody really should be doing. as is probably clear, slint is a bit before my time. but i lived through dmst's rise in ottawa. and they're important, historically, for other reasons i'd rather not remind myself of.

i should probably point out that this isn't my favourite record or anything. we all know how influential it was. but regarding the rock of the period, i'd personally rather listen to sonic youth. or drive like jehu. or the smashing pumpkins...

Eben Hoffer
there was a pitchfork interview with slint a little while ago, on the anniversary-- which I can't seem to find right now, but go looking-- and they talked a good amount about how being in louisville at the time they were playing meant they were really cut off from a lot of what was happening in other indie scenes, and to a large extent were trying crazy stuff and following their noses without much of a sense of 'influence'. I'd look to other 90s 00s kentucky bands, like rodan, rachel's, and in general anything on quarterstick records.

Ned Blackburn
are you sure you don't hear some Red-era crimson in here? Dem tritones...i can hear some shellac too. also leave Jawbox alone, FYSS is a fantastic record

deathtokoalas
as i said before, fripp was a very jagged and constructed player when he was in crimson. his rhythm work was based on sudden interruptions and jarring juxtapositions. his work with eno was a little less written out, but it was almost entirely lead playing. the aspect of pajo's style that i'm drawing attention to and trying to trace forwards (through a minor forest and tortoise to do make say think, and also to la dispute through some still unknown intermediary) is really fluid and based mostly on strong voiceleading. this is a renaldo/moore/branca/reich thing.

about the only thing i can hear is a mild similarity between washer and starless, but it's mild - washer sounds no more like starless than it does like tears for fears or joy division or the cure or television or even u2. red is mostly a jazz fusion record; slint is definitely in a punk lineage. again: sonic youth is the missing link there, not king crimson.

if anything, i hear more of an influence from early 80s belew, which was the period he was also working with the talking heads.

i may have over-reacted in reducing the shellac and big black influences. that would have been out of annoyance. i'm asking for influences forward (and tangentially, backwards) regarding a flowing, jazz-influenced, voice-leading clean guitar style. that's not coming from albini, although some of the (sporadic) heavier sections might plausibly be. again, though, i don't see any reason to deviate from the heavy sonic youth dominance in the sound.

functio1
It's no big deal in terms of their sound. If you play the vinyl at twice speed it sounds like various bands that  were around slightly before this album, specifically punk bands like SNFU, Spermbirds and a few others. Slowing all that down wasn't just something Slint did - Codeine did the same thing, and others slowed things down even more (even down to the 'brown note'). The only reason some people chuck the 'jazzy' thing at Slint is probably because (a) they're music journos who'd never heard of the band until post 2000 and were desperate to quantify it into some sort of genre pigeon hole (such is their wont, the talentless gits) and (b) some people are generally ignorant of a whole flavour of hardcore punk that did the whole timing/chord change stuff, only faster, in the late 80s. I first heard this album the week it came out in the UK, and at very very high volume through a madly powerful PA. Yes, it was amazingly good, but at the time we didn't sit around rubbing our chins and pondering where it all came from, whether it was jazzy, etc etc - it was a progression of things that had gone on before, especially if you'd listened to some US hardcore bands from a few years before.  And, to be honest, it did have the flavour of Big Black, Bitch Magnet, and a few others when hearing it the first time around - and especially if you'd heard Slint's first album when that came out. So it's a melange, in a good way. But anyone trying to make out that it was some sort of isolated new sound that suddenly appeared in 1991 is not only barking up the wrong tree, but is barking up the wrong tree in the wrong forest.

deathtokoalas
i think i mostly agree with what you're saying (although it should be clarified that what came from it was pretty jazzy. i mentioned a few times i'm working backwards from dmst and tortoise, who are both pretty jazzy), and i can construct the general idea of it well from all the stuff like swans and sonic youth that i spent so much time with in the late 90s (working backwards from growing up with grunge), but there's a specific voice leading in the sound that is undeniably Jazz (with a capital j).

but, maybe it was just some guitarists sitting down and deciding they liked a type of voice leading. nobody seems to have a better answer.

i seem like i'm contradicting myself, lol. i mean, it's slowed down hardcore (i've used the goofy term no wave, just cause people understand what that means, and it fits like a glove in it's most generic meaning), at it's root rather than jazz. but (in places) it's using a guitar-centric compositional technique found in a lot of smoother types of jazz (rather than the more free, noisy jazz crimson fit into.). and i've listened to so many jazz guitarists, and just can't place the style well - despite hearing it come up over and over again in all kinds of music from about 95 onwards.

*shrug*.

functio1
Maybe it's better just to see it as coming from the more metal elements of hardcore/thrash. That all may have jazz roots, but it doesn't mean that any of those bands had heard of any of it. People borrow from all over the place without having to trace a direct line from one form of music into their own. You just roll with what you like the sound of, and may not know - or care - where it comes from. The same could be said of jazz guitarists too, of course.

deathtokoalas
there's practically no voice leading in that type of metal. it's pretty much the precise characteristic that gives it that ugly sound. it's all fifths crashing against each other.

as somebody that is interested in the historical development of the instrument, it's very interesting to me. so, it'd be nice if people could lay off the "it doesn't matter" schtick. to me, it does. because i want it to..

David Jackson
I found an interview with Britt Walford where he goes into detail on what music he thinks influenced Spiderland. Artists he mentions in the interview are: Nick Cave, Madonna and Big Black. http://www.factmag.com/2014/03/12/murder-ballads-an-interview-with-slint/

Also a Dave Pajo list of his top 13 albums. Big Black shows up again, as well as Steve Reich, Leonard Cohen, Die Kreuzen.
http://thequietus.com/articles/13851-david-pajo-slint-favourite-albums

For the record neither mentions King Crimson or Butthole Surfers

deathtokoalas
see, this is what i mean, though. the reich and cave (and maybe cohen) are probably legitimate, the big black is maybe posing a little (although it's there), the die kreuzen is probably posing flat out (it's often mentioned as an influence on "emo") and the rest of it almost seems sarcastic. it's like he's inserting madonna for swans or something. still, none of it gets to the aspect of the sound i'm thinking of...

Voyaging123
the playing is largely uninfluenced; in other words, it is almost entirely original/innovative, there's a reason this album is so important in the history of rock

great works of art cannot be strictly traced back to their predecessors for the very reason they are great: they are original, though of course true and complete originality is impossible... I see no obvious direct influences on the playing

deathtokoalas
nothing is uninfluenced. pretentious nonsense.

it's a total rip-off of sonic youth.

and it's not a great record. an influential record, sure, but a pretty boring one, in totality.

i'm sick of morons responding to this so i'm closing the thread. if you have anything worthwhile to say, find a way to contact me. otherwise, fuck you.

ugh. if you're going to try to track me down to give me your brilliant insight, please LOOK UP WHAT THE TERM "VOICE LEADING" MEANS FIRST.

judging from past attempts to track me down, chances are that you not only do not have the insight i'm looking for, but you probably don't even understand the question.

read this first. please:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_leading